Storage system can be categorized as internal storage or external storage system.
The internal storages of a computing system include those storage media such as hard disk drives, memory sticks, memory, and others that are internally connected within the computing system through system bus or a few inches of cable. Therefore, the storage media actually are internal components of the computing system in a same enclosure.
The external storages of a computing system are those storage media that are not the internal components of the computing system in a same enclosure. Therefore, they have to be connected through longer cable, such as through Ethernet cable for IP based storage, Fiber channel cable for fiber channel storage, or wireless communication media, and others. The storage media of the external storage could be magnetic hard disk drives, solid state disk, optical storage drives, memory card and others, and could be in any form such as Raid which usually consists of a group of hard disk drives.
To effectively use a storage system, the storage devices of the storage system usually need to be partitioned into small volumes. After the partitioning, each of the volumes can be used for establishing a file system on top of it. To simplify the discussion, herein, the term of the storage volume and its corresponding file system, and the term of the storage partition are often used without differentiation in this invention.
CCDSVM in this invention is an abbreviation for a central controlled distributed scalable virtual machine. The CCDSVM allows a control management system to control a group of computing systems for providing distributed services to client systems over the Internet, Intranet, and LAN environment.
By the way, in this invention, the ISP refers to Internet service provider and the ASP refers to application service provider.
Unless specified, the programming languages and the protocols used by the software modules, and the computing systems used in this invention are assumed to be the same as described in the prior patent applications.
In addition, in the drawing, like elements are designated by like reference numbers. Further, when a list of identical elements is present, only one element may be given the reference number.